Internet giant Yahoo is reportedly scanned users emails for the US intelligence agencies. Yahoo has been accused of secretly giving all the information about user’s emails to the US intelligence officials. It is reported that Yahoo has built software that scans all the incoming emails of all the yahoo users for the specific information or queries given by the US intelligence officials. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that they have worked hard to earn users trust and now fighting hard to preserve it. For years, Yahoo has been giving all the information scanned by its custom program to the US intelligence agencies. It is claimed by the formal employees that the software was developed on the orders of US government and this led to the resignation of the Alex Stamos who was the chief information security officer of the Yahoo. Initially, Alex Stamos and other security team members thought that hackers had compromised the email security of the company. But after Alex Stamos realized that Mayor has approved this program then he instantly resigned. This surveillance program has been condemned by the members of Congress and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union. The company says that content or information from twenty-one thousand user’s accounts was requested between January and July 2015. Yahoo says that it needs a valid legal process to use user’s data except in some instances where it is concluded that disclosure without delay is essential to prevent danger.
Leaks by Edward Snowden
It is not the first time that Yahoo leaked the customer’s data to the US intelligence agencies. Earlier in 2013 the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked the Yahoo provides users data to NSA’s PRISM program. Forcing a private company to give users data is much worse than NSA’s collection program because the government is searching and seizing content without any warrant. This leak of Yahoo is another reminder to the users that their data or content on the internet is not at all safe or private as they think.
What information is US intelligence searching for?
This is the first case where any tech company agrees to search all the messages on demand of a spy agency. It is still not clear that exactly what information is US intelligence agencies are searching for. According to Reuters, US agencies have ordered Yahoo to search for the set of characters that could mean an attachment or a phrase in an email. It is also still not clear that the agencies had approached other companies too for the data.